Not denying their monopoly position, but how could Google meaningfully be broken up? It's really just a single business (advertising) with a gaggle of loss leaders adding up to less than 20% of revenue. Even pushing advertising down to 80% took a huge amount of effort.
It's not like Standard Oil which was a vertically integrated trust of several points in the value chain, or the bell system which could be broken up geographically (and manufacturing spun out). Or FB which could divest business units like Instagram and WhatsApp.
A better way of looking at it is that Google is a collection of traffic drivers (YouTube, Gmail, etc) and monetizers (ads).
If you break the monetization into a separate company, the traffic drivers aren't profitless: because a large part of the ad profit was created from their traffic.
If Google Ads had to buy space / share ad revenue from Google YouTube, Google Gmail, etc then economics would look a lot more reasonable.
And I'd frankly be shocked if that isn't what they do internally, albeit more in the sense of "How much ad traffic do you drive, from your corner of the company?"
If an oil compnay gave away cars for free and became a car monopolist, people would be up in arms, vut Google's BS is somehow acceptable
YouTube, Google search, deep mind, Google fiber, waymo, Fitbit etc
Seems pretty easy to break up if you want to.
Google Cloud is big enough to be significant in terms of revenue, but AFAIK is only maybe breaking even in terms of profit. If you break up Alphabet into 26 or more different companies, you haven't broken up the monolith into non-problematic small companies 1/26th the size of the original, you've got 25 irrelevant companies and then one subsidiary that gets Ads which is almost as big as the original. Google even says as much in their financial statements, most of those listed companies are listed as 'other bets' and are a tiny fraction of the main line item that represents ads.
Google cloud gotten profitable enough that they only spent $5B to earn $4B in revenue last quarter. After a dozen years that's the best ever (classic case of monopoly leverage to get into a different market).
Advertising is "only" 81% of revenue but almost 100% of profit.
Some other commenters have proposed that properties like YT and Android drive ad traffic but when I looked at the last 10Q it looked like YT was about 10% of ad revenues. I believe Android is a net loss but worth it in that it's an offset to reduce payments to Apple. But I just skimmed the filing because this is just an HN comment.
It would also stop them favouring their own products in search results
Few, if any of those companies would be viable on their own. They require monopoly support. For example Google Cloud loses a billion a quarter (they spent $5B last quarter total in $4B).
As far as the cloud market goes there's really only one player, the profitable, pure play AWS. Everybody else is losing money, and mostly fudging the numbers (Google "cloud" includes Gmail, Google Workspace etc; MS's cloud includes running Windows for big customers, Office 360 etc etc).
Nest is marginally profitable.
Otherwise it's pretty thin gruel.
Perhaps Google Search, Chrome, and the advertising business could be split. Or Google Search could be split into Google Search 1 and Google Search 2.
0: https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/3/21121207/youtube-google-al...
With competing "engines" (defined as a ranking algorithm and frontend to query said algorithm) building from the same, high-quality index competition in the search space could get much better.
Engines such as DuckDuckGo relying on Bing for the majority of their index is a decent example of how this might work.
Big things would be Advertising separate from other things and bound to only advertising, and require it contract with the other units on public and FRAND terms. Web Search would be another unit, and it would be barred from developing its own advertising platform and need to use a mix of advertising platforms based on public criteria, probably with a cap of say 75%? AdWords. You'd have at least one more group for communications (mail, the 7 messengers, etc) which maybe includes the document tools too, and might include G Suite; this group could develop its own ad platform, but not to sell ads on 3rd party sites. Android would need to be a separate unit, it could either require a per device fee or FRAND terms for search etc bundling (similar the what they do in the EU); Chrome maybe fits in this group, or may need its own group. Google Fiber would probably get shut down or sold to an incumbent telco, but maybe just spun out. Waymo and other research stuff would probably need to be spun out, not sure if that can live on its own though.
Cloud services would be its own group, perhaps providing services to the other groups, possibly requiring public pricing, but I don't know if that's really an issue.
I think that's most of it. Lawyers from DOJ and Alphabet could work out the details. Getting a competitive ad market out of the deal would be hard, but at least it could be more transparent, and eliminating cross-subsidization of Google businesses is definitely possible.
Start by cloning the whole source repository for each company, and prune out the things that don't need to stay; if in doubt all successor companies get access to all of it.
Android is a separate unit, AFAIK.
Most people are angry at Facebook for reasons like not understanding their business model (they sell my data! is one I hear often) or because Facebook allows a platform where average people can speak their thoughts.
They would immediately be acquired by a competitor or declare bankruptcy.
I mean, yeah this is exactly the point. They have locked competition out of the loss-leading categories by undercutting them. Breaking them up forces the loss leaders to compete on an even playing field, which will mean more competition.
I don't get where this bizarre belief that "moar free market" will solve issues. Let's setup proper legal framework where these companies must have a good reason to terminate contract instead - and properly explain it with the ability to appeal.
Businesses aren't people, they're legal fiction. The individuals who make these decisions do and should have the right to do business with whomever they want, based on any criteria they deem appropriate. This constitutes the distinction between the private and public sphere.
There's a subtle distinction where you may have layered your own individual beliefs onto this statement by using the word "should", rather than indicating what is actually the law. While you may feel they "should" have that right based on your own feelings and personal morality, there are specific laws that say they do not. In many jurisdictions within the U.S., for example, businesses generally do not have the right to refuse business to a person based on that person being part of a protected class.
In any case, I disagree. Some things are basic necessities.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/banking/can-my-bank-close...
That said I do wish there was some regulation for accounts for Apple, Microsoft, Google, Steam, etc as closing an account can have huge reprocussions.
Go find them on LinkedIn, message your experience and statement that you're leaving.
When corporations put up higher and higher walls around their official channels of communication, you either need to get louder or go around the wall.
I am working for a big e-commerce corp., we are made to read/go-through customer feedback occasionally. That is just to find a %1~ of potential conversion improvement we can make.
Companies do care about conversion/retention. Problem is only the communication between the customer and the right team of people inside.
Eric Shmidt: I would agree, sir, that we’re in that area....I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding of monopoly findings is this is a judicial process.
From: https://www.businessinsider.com/is-google-a-monopoly-were-in...
Also, the FTC's initial memo from 2012 that somebody higher up in the food chain quashed is pretty interesting: http://graphics.wsj.com/google-ftc-report/
In short, dominant market share in web search. Though I think you could argue other things, like dominance in affordable smart phones. Android is effectively a monopoly for people that can't afford an iPhone.
Having Market Share Dominance != Monopoly
Being a monopoly means having sole control over the supply of a market (conversely, Monopsony is demand). When people say Bing, Baidu, DDG, Yahoo, DDG, etc. are all a click a way, that means Google does not control the market supply.
Just because the majority of people choose to use something on an open market doesn't mean that thing has a monopoly.
===
A. GOOGLE HAS MONOPOLY POWER IN RELEVANT MARKETS
A firm is a monopolist if it can profitably raise prices substantially above the competitive level. [M]onopoly power may be inferred from a firm's possesion of a dominant share of a relevant market that is protected by entry barriers. Google has monopoly power in one or more properly defined markets...Staff has identified three relevant antitrust markets...
===
I think it's at least fair to say that some people with expertise in the space feel like Google could have monopoly control over one or more markets.
Also, a half-redacted document written by an anonymous person that was accidentally released almost a decade ago does not change the definition of a monopoly.
Yes, you can assume that it's written by someone who knows what they're talking about, just as much as you can also presume they were wrong because it was squashed. That's a moot argument.
None of that changes the fact that being popular does not make something a monopoly.
I didn't say that, though, or anything like that.
I did mention market share dominance. But that's often related to things like "A firm is a monopolist if it can profitably raise prices substantially above the competitive level.".
"may be inferred from a firm's possesion of a dominant share of a relevant market that is protected by entry barriers"
Arguably I left out "protected by entry barriers", but that seems obvious for search.
You're splitting hairs over the word popular now.
For example: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/7273448-DOC.html (page 3)
I'm not saying they are "for sure" a monopoly. I am saying notable numbers of reasonable people with expertise in the space think they are. It's not as clear cut as you're saying.
This entirely new example you are giving is an example of partisan posturing, not evidence of a monopoly. Look at the political affiliation of every single person who signed the letter, and look how many days it was filed before the last federal election.
Again, being popular doesn't make something a monopoly, neither does being a popular target for Republicans.
Google ad revenues mostly come from 3 services: Gmail, which holds a disproportionate share of all email for what started out as a federated network. YouTube, which basically holds a monopoly on video sharing. And Google search, which basically holds a monopoly on regular web searches.
I count at least 2 monopolies here, both held by Alphabet. The fact that Facebook is able to make advertisement in some other part of the web is immaterial, the same way TV ads are immaterial.
Facebook has 90%+ market share of social media. Do they have a monopoly?
GitHub has a 90%+ market share of open source code hosting. Do they have a monopoly?
I don’t know whether this kind of market dominance factors into the legal determination of monopoly, but conceptually I think it makes sense to say that Google has a monopoly in the web search market.
The customer in a web search isn't the USER. It's the BUISINESSES whose ads are placed on the search results page.
THEY are certainly paying for the web search.
They own the highway, the restaurants along the way, the billboards and even the car most people drive.
If consumers preferred a search engine with good customer service, they would use the search engine with better customer service instead.
Email addresses need the same regulation. The arguments that lead to phone number portability apply to email addresses as well. And I would argue that email addresses are even more important than phone numbers at this point (it's the single key to all online accounts, most bills, documents, statements are emailed as PDFs, a lot of government services expect a working email address).
Email addresses have become critical and portability needs to become a requirement for all email services. There are technical issues, for example if someone cancels Gmail service, how can the @gmail.com address be moved elsewhere? It's not as simple as phone number portability. Maybe a regulation that any email service must provide forwarding service to another email address even if the service is no longer active? Or maybe a trusted mapping that exists outside any single service, kind of like a DNS for email addresses.
The domain is useful to signify membership in an organization. But for individuals, why should our addresses have hotmail or gmail or yahoo or anything else appended to it?
EDIT: Many people are replying with some variant that the problem is that Google can block the email account that people have tied to their financial and government services.
But the same is true of any other email provider. If Google is somehow turned into a public utility, how does that solve the problem for those that are locked out of their email accounts by Fastmail, for instance? Make Fastmail a public utility too, or somehow regulate it? But it's an Australian company, so kind of outside of American jurisdiction. Or regulate the addresses themselves? Put up a law that says that only US public utilities can administer emails on the .com domain? I don't really understand what people are proposing.
Or is the proposal just to regulate gmail.com addresses in particular? Treat them as the exception and incentivize more people to use that one provider so they get the protections offered by the proposed regulation.
Google's ability to unilaterally revoke access to the account that ties you to your banking accounts, your state's online service portals, &c. gives them the kind of power that we'd normally only see in regional monopolies like water utilities.
If I'm banned by my provider, I won't have any recourse for many of them except to discover at some point in the future that I've missed an important alert, billing statement, or notice of action. And that's even before I know that I need to go to a physical location or mail in some kind of identification!
Of course not! But the USPS has (virtually) free change-of-address forwarding[1], and we have an entire set of social and governmental institutions pre-built around the impermanency of physical addresses. No such institutions exist for digital addressing.
I agree, re: backups, and I keep them for myself. But it occurs to me that the average non-technical individual probably doesn't know how to make a backup of their GMail account. I use GSuite, and the last time I checked I had to explicitly enable IMAP and then set a custom "app password" in order to set up IMAP access for my backup client. Oh, and there was some Google-specific TLS weirdness; boundaries abound.
I do think it would be optimal if there were a fallback option for all types of digital accounts. It is not Google's fault, though, that there isn't, as they are not the cause of the assumption of email address permanence. You need to lay your blame at the feet of the service providers.
I do also think it might be ideal if Google would forward emails to an address of your choosing in the event they closed your account.
What about smaller webmail providers? Yahoo and Hotmail gave me email addresses back in the day, and then deleted them for inactivity. Your argument applies equally well there. How about those Fastmail accounts that people are paying for? Should they get to keep them even after terminating service?
Clearly all of this is completely absurd. The "important stuff is tied to a single email address" case is extremely weak.
You'll note that I haven't said anywhere that Google (or anyone else!) is obligated to provide indefinite email service to anybody who happens to sign up. What I've observed is that, unlike my physical address, there are virtually no formal recourses proportional to the role that my email has in my official identity. I can request an address change with USPS, I am guaranteed delivery service, and federal law protects my mailbox from tampering and snooping; nothing requires Google to provide anything resembling these safeguards.
I understood your argument to be "email addresses are important" + "Google provides email addreses" -> "Google should be regulated as a public utility". But like I showed, the same applies to basically every kind of organization providing email addresses.
So either you are asking for basically every single organization to be a public utility, or there is some discriminating function you're not stating.
It's getting a little muddled, but the observation was this: email addresses increasingly serve the same role as physical addresses. We have an entire social and legal framework around the guarantees of physical mail because of how important it is to our ability to transact our daily lives; no corresponding framework exists for email.
> So either you are asking for basically every single organization to be a public utility, or there is some discriminating function you're not stating.
The discriminating function, as I said in the very first response, is the necessary role of a service in identifying ourselves to essential services (read: utilities, financials, government). My belief is that email satisfies this condition. But also, as I said in the first: I don't really know if I commit to the public utility argument; I merely wanted to point out that email serves a role tantamount to the canonical public service (public mail). If that's the case, we ought at the very least to have similar entitlements with our email providers.
No access to water from the only provider in your reach, especially if you're kind of broke, really doesn't seem equal to having your email account blocked, when people have very accessible choices of email providers and what they tie to it.
The situation sucks, but looking at this from a public utility perspective seems like an XY problem.
I think this point might have been true 15 or 20 years ago, but I suspect that it no longer is on either front:
* E-mail is increasingly non-federated and subject to Google's dictates w/r/t delivery guarantees, origin identification, &c. These aren't bad things; e-mail was a mess before Google started taking it seriously! But it does result in a sort of natural dominance: smaller providers have to play by Google's rules to ensure delivery; large institutions are less likely to debug delivery issues to smaller providers. In other words, I have to be willing to accept a certain amount of second-class treatment.
* It's been my experience that my ability to not tie things to my e-mail has diminished over the years. More recent government systems and financial accounts require a valid e-mail; e-mail + password is now the default setting for creating an account on most services. Even when my e-mail is strictly optional for a service, it frequently operates as a safety net (recovery codes, poor man's 2FA, &c). Put another way: my inbox is treated as the high-availability, high-reliability delivery mechanism.
If you're paying for your email provider, I would think opening up a ticket and asking to let their email through would not be much of an issue, if this ever happens.
It's usually the other way around, in my experience: I'm sending something from a relatively small provider (or a institutional mailserver), and it's rejected (sometimes silently) by a larger receiver. The reasons tend to be opaque, and support is nonexistent (presumably because the overwhelmingly amount incoming mail is illegitimate).
It's a hard problem, and the reality is that Google has made the average user's email experience radically better. But the drawback of that is that they rule the ecosystem by fiat, and that there are relatively few entities that can play keep-up with Google's (unpublished?) standards for reliable delivery. Getting booted out of Gmail increasingly means being left out in the cold, especially as institutions (like the company I work for!) use GSuite for mail.
I accept this argument for social media, but I don't think I do for online identities that are tightly integrated into financial and government services.
I happen to be sufficiently positioned to cause a big stink if Google arbitrarily bans my GSuite account; the average person probably isn't, and would have to spend weeks reidentifying themselves to essential services (my power bill goes through my email!) to ensure that their material welfare isn't disrupted. Is that acceptable?
Every time you smash that "log in with google" button, you're opting in to letting Google serve as intermediary for access to your account at a third party.
People are fools for doing this, but it's not Google's fault.
I won't deny that I opted in to a particular service, or that I can opt out just as quickly. But cf. the other threads about my formal recourses, quality of service, and others' expectations around reliability of delivery should I choose to leave the Google bubble.
Google's fault or not, I don't think this is an acceptable situation.
Of course this is nowhere near as critical as water, food, or shelter. But in the modern world losing access to your long time email address, like a phone number, will cause some pain. I see no reason not to put such a responsibility on Google or companies of similar size which are so tightly integrated with the critical modern infrastructure.
I think we need to look at the utility of the service in the world and society we live in. Things change, 400 years ago a mill was the first utility in the US. That doesn't quite fit the definition anymore these days.
Let's go further. Is Apple a public utility? If I buy an iPhone and it's painful to lose it, doesn't Apple have a monopoly over my iPhone given that they have kill switches and update privileges?
Is Hertz a public utility? If I rent a car and it becomes very painful to lose it, doesn't Hertz have a monopoly over my essential car?
A phone or a car are nowhere near that level of uniqueness. People don't need your IMEI or VIN number to identify you. You can still have a backup of your data which for all intents and purposes will turn any other phone into the one that was taken from you. And if Hertz somehow just takes back your car full of your personal stuff you have plenty of recourse. Most other critical industries were either regulated as utilities or self regulated.
The problem is that companies like Google give you the service ostensibly for free and use this to justify being able to completely cut access to your account with absolutely no recourse and no explanation. You didn't pay anything so you can't expect anything. On the other hand they do monetize your data which invalidates the "for free" premise. They also don't give you any possibility to transfer the ownership of those uniquely identifying elements.
Perhaps any mail provider like ProtonMail or Fastmail should also be regulated as utilities. When electricity was deemed a utility it was probably used by fewer people and it was less useful to them than mail is today. At the very least companies like Google, Apple, and the rest of the bunch should be very tightly regulated.
You can use maps or youtube without an account but you will never receive that job offer without your email. And you may not be able to access your other critical accounts since they rely on email.
Let's put it another way: maybe an email provider should not be allowed to be used for critical services like banking, utilities, public services, etc. unless they themselves accept to be regulated as utilities. The point is to not have critical services relying on ones with a proven low quality of service track record.
People use my address to identify me too. Does that make my rented home a public utility? I can't take my home address with me. I guess my landlord should be forced by law to renew my lease indefinitely otherwise I'll lose my geographical name.
> You can use maps or youtube without an account but you will never receive that job offer without your email. And you may not be able to access your other critical accounts since they rely on email.
Of course you can receive job offers without a specific email. You can update your job seeking profile and inform companies you've applied to of a new email. It's also entirely up to you to share additional forms of contact like a phone number when you apply.
Any account critical enough to be considered a public utility like banking, utilities, public services, etc won't be solely based on email and will have non-email recovery mechanisms, usually based on your actual identity.
That's going to be a lot more difficult when your email address is tied to a certain domain, like gmail. I think there has to be a different kind of solution there, that is more accessible to the layman than setting up your own domain and dealing with MX records and stuff.
The issue isn't that people are free to choose any email address. The problem is that Google effectively holds people hostage once they get involved with its ecosystem. And due to its sheer size and power, no one can afford to be banned by Google. And there's no real way to appeal. It's a rights regression of sorts.
[1] I should also mention the time I looked at my driving record in Louisiana and discovered the remnant of their pre-1981 practice of putting race on driver's licenses. Under my ethnic category (which I had never filled out or been asked) was 'O'. I turned to the clerk and asked "What does this stand for?" She replied "Other." I said "I thought maybe it would be Oriental" (since I am Pakistani-American). She replied "That would be too politically incorrect." I said, "My expectations for this state in that regard are not high."
right?
Two can play this maralism game, see?